Stuttering on the Stage

Our Time THEATRE COMPANY, located in New York City, is an artistic home for people who stutter which, "provides an environment free from ridicule where PWS discover the joy of creating and performing original theater."

Lou Heite shared that Philip Glass' opera "Einstein On the Beach," uses electronically created stuttering to deliberately break the rhythm of the passage. "There is a segment in Philip Glass' opera Einstein on the Beach, in the connecting segments which he calls Knee 1 and Knee 5 in which the singer actually does have a scripted stutter, not just a musical repeat but close to the real thing, on the letter 'f.' I think it is supposed to represent a technological breakdown."

Words are a powerful drug, but in the world of people who stutter, they are an enemy and music is a friend. Two strangers confront each other and their own demons as they struggle to set their voices free. Soundings is about triumph over personal limitations, music from Beethoven to Nine Inch Nails, mountain climbing, fresh encounters and verbal fisticuffs.

Darkly humorous and emotionally uplifting, this play is about choosing and changing one's future. A contemporary comic-drama, Soundings explores the power of language to enrich our lives...or lock us out.

The play is written by Los Angeles author Beverly Olevin. A talented ensemble cast is led by award-winning director Jon Lawrence Rivera of Playwright's Arena.

There is a character who stutters in the play, Humble Boy. The character is "an eccentric but brilliant astrophysicist who was going through some pretty tough times. This rough patch included coping with the recent death of his beloved father, the discovery that his mother had long been having an affair and was about to remarry and that his university sweetheart had hidden the knowledge that her six-year-old child was actually his.

It was through this chain of tragedies that the childhood stutter he used to have (a mild stutter that mainly occurred with words starting with B) came back to affect him again. . . . In the character, the stutter was not a huge focus. It was used to give another layer of depth to an already complex character.

The first instance of the stutter was used to lighten the mood. The audience reaction was hilarity, because of the banter between the characters. . . . The speech impediment was quickly made secondary to the character. This was done in such a subtle way that although the stutter was obvious the audience simply accepted it as part of who the character was. This was shown through the audience who, apart from the initial realisation of the stutter, showed no other obvious reaction - an indication to me that people's reaction to speech impediments are often thrown out of proportion in our own heads."

Humble Boy - originally posted to Stutt-L, 4/22/07, JY

The male lead in the play "Humble Boy" stutters. I saw a local professional theater production. . . . I was not familiar with the play so I was a bit surprised when stuttered speech came from the actor's mouth. The initial response from the audience was laughter. . . . But to the credit of the audience, I believe, after they realized the stutter was a part of the character and not the comic relief they stopped laughing.

A play based on a novel, "tells the story of the stuttering, antisocial Buddist acolyte Mizoguchi, who will eventually set the fire that destroys Kinkaku-ji, the 550-year-old temple in Kyoto. Based on an event that occurred in 1950." Quoted from William Thornton's blog, "Brilliant Disguises."